Worship
The benefit of a worshipping Christian who is walking symbiotically is intensely personal. You may worship corporately as a body, but the intent is for other fellow Christians striving to worship God to help you worship Him as well, just as you, singly or in a subgroup, strive in your worship to help others worship as well.
It is true that life isn't all about you, and that you should be mindful of others and their needs. However, worship is God's way of saying that it is not true that it is never about you either. It is the height of foolishness to say to God, when He "meets" you in worship, for Him to skip over you and go on to someone else. Is He not Omnipresent? Is it possible for there to be more of Him in someone else because you wanted less of Him in you? You are either being foolishly humble (and fooling no one), or terribly deceived about how much He personally cares for you.
Of course, it is a figure of speech to say that "God meets you in worship": If you have gotten anything from all the essays before, and including, this one, the most important one should be that the Holy Spirit is literally, not figuratively or "spiritually", within you. The key take-away from these essays should be that He is totally and completely sold out to you to the point of being your biggest cheerleader, helper, and lover. If you have started getting benefits after learning about how to cooperate with Him to the point of communication, then you have a lot to say to Him about how wonderful He's been. Be sure to keep a mental record of what He's been doing through you and in you symbiotically, thank Him for his help while reciting that record, and praise him for each one, either silently or aloud. Be assured that the unity of the Trinity allows you to worship God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit within you. Being resident in the Heart, the Spirit knows what you think of God, Jesus, and Him, and passes on the information to the Others.
However, true worship, like true love, leaps to new heights when the one being loved responds personally. This is effected by Stage 2 capabilities, where the ideas and thoughts the Holy Spirit throws into the Bitstream are the ideas and thoughts the Holy Spirit, and through him Jesus Christ, has about you, and you alone. I mean, if they were about someone else, then what you do is pass the message on to the recipient. It may be exhortation or witnessing, but those are not worship. Probably the only time when others impact your worship, or when you impact their worship, is if either of you have offended the other. Jesus' counsel is that if you are made to recall that someone has something against you while you are worshipping, you need to take care of it immediately: Jesus talked about leaving your gift on the altar to settle things before completing the offering. The scripture is plain that you have to take the initiative, not the other. The implication is that if the other has offended you, the advice is for them as well. Don't think you need to do anything to get the ball rolling: do you really think the scripture only applies to you, only you, and no one else? Do you really believe you will be judged if you don't obey the scripture, but everyone else will be let off if they don't obey the scripture? If you let that feeling of being offended interfere with your worship, then some Variance Management needs to be done.
I want to take the opportunity to totally debunk the most piously trite saying said about the Scriptures when it comes to Worship: one has to wonder if those who say that "the Scriptures are Jesus' love letter to you!" have actually written any love letters. One has to question their good sense if, in wooing Sally, they send her a xerox of a love letter they sent to Alice. One should worry about Sally's self-image (or sanity) if she took it seriously even when the sender didn't even take the time to scratch out Alice's name and scribble 'Sally' above it. One should be assured that whatever Sally does to the sender when she receives such a letter, the sender will have richly and rightly deserved it.
The scriptures certainly contain messages of love explicitly directed to all who believe. But being asked to believe that God personally and intensely loves you based only on what He says to everyone or to someone else personally is to live on very thin gruel indeed. Such messages are meant to lead you from unbelief to faith, from faith to Symbiosis, from Symbiosis to Communication, and from Communication to Communion.
This essay was delayed for several days, not because I have no experience with worshipping symbiotically, but that the experience is so contrary to what some believe it should be that I was hesitant to write about it. However, I got a sense of approval from Within when I recalled that I had made a promise that everything I would write about is either something that I have verified by personal experience, or have very strong reasons to believe is true and attainable, with the added proviso that I clearly distinguish experience from conjecture. This is my experience. This is what has happened to me.
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